Gravitas Offshore Limited is the latest UK company to secure innovation funding from a DECC and Technology Strategy Board (TSB) innovation scheme to support the development of next generation offshore wind technology.
Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker said: “The Coalition is committed to driving green growth and spurring on low carbon innovation. This investment from DECC will help new UK company Gravitas Offshore Limited develop and demonstrate the benefits of its innovative turbine foundation design, cutting costs for offshore wind and helping it enter the growing green market place.”
Gravitas Offshore Ltd, based in Maidenhead, has been awarded £556,250 to help develop and demonstrate its concrete gravity foundation for large offshore wind turbines. Concrete foundations have the potential to secure significant cost savings and this project will help to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of this approach against foundation technologies adopted hitherto for offshore wind systems in the UK. The Gravitas project will also help to develop reliability standards for concrete offshore wind foundations.
Confirmation of the Gravitas grant follows the awards earlier in 2012 of grants totalling more than £3.2million from the same innovation support scheme to David Brown Gear Systems Ltd, NGenTec Ltd, OSBIT Power Ltd and OGN Ltd. All five winning projects from the first call of the DECC and Technology Strategy Board’s Offshore Wind Component Technologies Scheme are expected to deliver products which could secure significant cost savings in the production of offshore wind energy in the future.
Bids have now been submitted for the second round of the DECC-TSB’s Offshore Wind Component Technologies funding. This second round, which closed at the end of June 2012 and has a budget of around £5m, has attracted further proposals which could reduce the cost of offshore wind energy through innovation in offshore wind component technology, manufacture and installation.
DECC and TSB also expect to launch a third offshore wind innovation competition in Autumn 2012, which would include funding of up to about £5m for component technology innovation. Details of the scheme will be published in September 2012.
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Offshore WIND staff, August 16, 2012; Image: gravitasoffshore